David's Take on "Avatar"

I figured if I was going to see the damn thing, I might as well catch it in the ultimate format for which it was intended. On January 2 I dragged my wife to the only iMax 3-D theater that was screening “Avatar” in Portland.

The physical context only added to my discomfort with the experience. The theater is in a multiplex at the heart of a suburban “village” mall where traffic and parking were nightmares in themselves, long lines of people stood in snaky lines waiting for an alternative, regular 3-D showing in an adjacent theater space (I showed up a half hour before my show’s time and 80 percent of the seats were already filled), the concessions stand was something like a hundred feet or more across (yet curiously had almost no one waiting in line to buy anything) . . . all symptoms of what I hate about this country.

If I had just seen the movie alone, outside that physical context, I might have felt more charitable toward it. For the most part I enjoyed “Avatar” while it lasted, but then I enjoy almost everything I bother to see. (If I remember correctly, the last time I was acutely annoyed by a movie was “Flirting With Disaster,” because so much of the so-called humor in it depended on repeatedly humiliating its characters.) “Avatar” didn’t seem quite as visually astounding as I had been led to believe, but I didn’t find it as badly written and plotted as I expected to, either. All the previews were in 3-D too, and I found some footage of space-walking astronauts tending to the Hubble Telescope even more amazing than most of “Avatar.” I loved the 3-D effect of the arrowhead coming through the body of the evil Colonel and seeming to pop out of the screen, though.

It was walking out and thinking about the experience as a whole, afterward, that soured me. The movie uplifted hearts, provoked wonder, and deeply moved its audience . . . but it won't change their behavior one little bit. We are all descendants of the villains of this movie; we have all benefited from, and probably continue to benefit from, the kind of behavior exhibited by the villains of this movie; and we are all made to cheer for the victims of just the kind of behavior that gave us our lavish, comfortable, toy-riddled lifestyle.

And I have the oddest sensation that the irony of this fact escaped 99 percent of the people who walked out of this picture thinking it was a fabulous story. Many of the folks I saw it with undoubtedly drove to the show in jacked-up SUVs (we drove a rented Zipcar, since we had given up car ownership more than half a decade ago), and stayed before or after to wander and shop in the endless mall through which I dashed without a backward glance.

My fear is that the worse things grow on Earth, the more we’ll turn to experiences like “Avatar” to distract and console us, rather than do the hard work of getting out of the hole we have dug for ourselves and the unfortunate critters who share the planet with us.

A couple of my friends have argued the movie provides a deeply spiritual experience -- that it uses high-tech in the service of high-touch values. I’m not so sure. I’ve seen much stronger, more imaginative attempts to change the world through art fail miserably in the sense of changing society as a whole. I don’t think we have that much time. We’re definitely doomed if we’re going to depend on eye candy (even deeply heart-wrenching eye candy) like “Avatar” to save us.